Al Stewart says 'Year of the Cat' and 'Time Passages' taught him pop hits aren't his scene
Long before he’d cracked the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 thanks to the sax-driven splendor of “Year of the Cat,” Al Stewart was doing his best to rock a seaside town called Bournemouth in the south of England as a teen guitarist in five or six beat groups when he came to a depressing realization.
“I looked in the mirror and I didn’t see a pop star,” the Scottish-born Stewart recalls. “Elvis and Cliff (Richards), those were pop stars. I couldn’t imagine doing that because I couldn’t sing very well and I was an average guitar player at best. I thought this is not working.”
By that point, he’d been turned on to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” by a woman working at the hippest record store in town.
“He didn’t sound like ‘Twist and Shout’ to me, which is what I’d been playing up to that point,” Stewart says.
When Al Stewart sang 'Masters of War' and the whole room froze
One Tuesday night in Bournemouth, Stewart’s bandmates went off to the pub on a break between sets at Le Disque a Go! Go!, where they’d bash out “Twist and Shout” three times a night to keep up with requests.
“I didn’t want to hang out in the pub,” he says. “So just for giggles, I got an acoustic guitar and sang ‘Masters of War,’ a song from ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’”
It’s a moment etched in Stewart’s memory.
“The crowd had never clapped for anything, even ‘Twist and Shout,’” he says.
“I sang ‘Masters of War’ and the whole room froze. You could’ve heard a pin drop. And when I finished, they applauded. No one had ever applauded anything I’d done until that point. I was like, ‘Wow, this is powerful stuff.’”
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How Al Stewart found a home in London's folk scene
Before the year was out, he’d moved to London.
“My initial idea was that I was gonna try and join a London band with a future,” Stewart says. “But I had to make some money and I heard there was a folk cellar where people sang actual folk songs with acoustic guitars.”
When Stewart went to check out Bunjies Coffee House, he happened to be holding a guitar case.
“The owner of the club came up to me, he looked at the guitar and said, ‘Are you a folk singer?’” Stewart recalls. “Of course, I wasn’t a folk singer, but I wasn’t gonna tell him that. I smelled a gig. He said, ‘Can you start Friday?’”
Stewart locked himself away that week and learned three albums’ worth of Dylan songs.
The owner’s only comment, he recalls, was, “You certainly sing a lot of Dylan songs.”
He got the gig, though, playing from 7-10 p.m. every Friday for three pounds a week, which seemed like a fortune.
When Stewart got wind of another folk club called Les Cousins opening two blocks away, he ended up landing another gig.
“It was run by a guy called Phil, and Phil had this really cute girlfriend,” Stewart says.
“They were running all-nighters on Friday from midnight to six and Saturday from midnight to seven. And Phil absolutely did not want to spend the entire weekend in a smoky cellar. He wanted to be out on his hot date.”
How Al Stewart came to follow Paul Simon around like a puppy dog
Suddenly Stewart was pulling in nine pounds a week as a working musician while staying for free in an East End flat whose owner, Judith Piepe, was a social worker who opened her home to folk musicians.
One day, Piepe told Stewart he would have to move into a smaller room. An American folk singer who always stayed in the room he’d been using was coming to town.
That’s how he found himself sharing a flat in the East End of London with a young Paul Simon.
“I could hear him through the wall,” Stewart says. “He was writing these great songs. I thought, ‘This is wonderful. I’ve just got to follow him around like a puppy dog.”
It wasn’t long before Simon was testing out his latest songs on the 19-year-old kid next door. He distinctly remembers Simon playing “Richard Cory” fresh from writing it.
“He’d written something else the day before, a song called ‘Homeward Bound,’” Stewart says.
“I was mildly impressed with that one but thought ‘Richard Cory’ was the thing. I said, ‘That song you wrote yesterday, ‘Homeward Bound?’ Throw that away. ‘Richard Cory’ is it.’”
Stewart laughs at the memory.
“And that began a very long career of being wrong about almost everything,” he says.
Meanwhile, Stewart was honing his skills on acoustic guitar, having witnessed Bert Jansch at Les Cousins doing things he didn’t think were possible on acoustic guitar.
“I thought, ‘Oh my Lord, more homework,’” Stewart says.
How 'Roads to Moscow' became Stewart's most requested song
By 1967, he’d launched his recording career with “Bedsitter Images,” his first release on CBS.
“Judy Collins had just made an album with an orchestra and CBS Records in their wisdom thought, ‘We’ll sign a folk singer – some up-and-coming idiot – and we’ll make him record with an orchestra and see what happens,” Stewart says.
“It was a bit of a mess, frankly. But there were one or two songs people liked.”
Things started falling into place, he says, with 1969’s “Love Chronicles,” whose 18-minute title track became a hit on college campuses.
The next big turning point was the writing of 1973’s “Past, Present and Future.”
“I decided I was not gonna write any more love songs,” Stewart says. “After ‘Love Chronicles,’ there’s not much more to say. I looked around and said, ‘What am I interested in?’ and the answer was history.”
French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Roads to Freedom” piqued his interest in the history of Nazi Germany and the Russian Front.
After reading maybe 50 books, he says, “I thought ‘Well, I could write a song about this period. No one’s done that.’”
“Roads to Moscow,” an eight-minute song about the German invasion of Russia, became his most requested song. Another highlight of that album was inspired by the prophecies of Nostradamus.
“‘Past, Present & Future’ outsold my first four albums put together,” Stewart says. “It was all historical but bang, I started playing the Royal Festival Hall and these serious grownup gigs, which was remarkable. I didn’t think you could make a living doing historical folk-rock, but apparently you can.”
Al Stewart on making 'Year of the Cat' with Alan Parsons
In 1975, his first collaboration with producer Alan Parsons, “Modern Times,” became his first hit album, largely driven by manager Luke O’Reilly having built a U.S. tour around visits to radio stations.
As Stewart recalls, “He said, ‘It’s all about radio stations in America. You’ll do gigs, but I don’t care if you read from a telephone directory. I don’t care if they cheer or throw things or ignore you. None of that matters. The reason we’re going to every major city in America is radio.”
When “Modern Times” hit No. 30 on the U.S. album chart, he thought he’d made it. But his manager had bigger plans.
“He said, ‘That’s all well and good. Now do it properly. I want you to write better songs. Keep Alan Parsons. He knows what he’s doing. I want you back on the road doing radio stations again with a new album. And the album had better be good because you’re only gonna get one shot and this is it.”
Stewart responded by making an album called “Year of the Cat.”
“I thought ‘Well, this sounds even better than the last one,” he says.
“If we made the Top 30 with ‘Modern Times,’ I bet we can make the Top 20 with ‘Year of the Cat.’ I think it’ll sell a quarter of a million, which seemed to me like landing on the moon. If you’re coming from Bunjies coffee bar, the idea of having a top 20 album in America seems outrageous.”
Released in 1976, the album peaked at No. 5, a platinum breakthrough driven by the title track, which peaked at No. 8 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the U.S. adult contemporary charts.
'Time Passages' made Al Stewart realize pop hits weren't his thing
Two years later, “Time Passages” became his second Top 10 album, thanks in large part to a title track that spent 10 week’s at No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart, the longest any song had spent at No. 1 on that chart the entire decade.
It’s at that point that he realized having pop hits wasn’t necessarily his cup of tea.
“Once you’ve had a pop hit, you attract a lot of looky-loos,” he says. “With ‘Past, Present & Future’ and ‘Modern Times,’ we had a solid, let’s say, 300 people coming to the shows. Once you’ve had a record in the Top 10, your 300 people become 3,000 and they’ve all come for the songs they know. They wanted ‘Year of the Cat.’ They wanted ‘Time Passages.’ And they liked the saxophone.”
He missed the days when fans were there to see him for the one thing he thought made his music memorable, the lyrics.
“I’d play ‘Roads to Moscow’ and they would just sit there and twiddle their thumbs,” he says. “I mean, the hard-core people loved it but there were all these people who basically were tourists. I thought, ‘I don’t want to keep making pop ballads with saxophones for the rest of my life.”
He compares it to Disneyland.
“It’s fun for a while and then it isn’t,” Stewart says. “I want to be a lyric writer. I’m supposed to be a lyric writer. So I went back to being a folk singer again.”
He’s been enjoying dusting off the hits that brought too many looky-loos now that he’s found a proper touring band, the Empty Pockets, after decades of struggling to do those songs justice with just two acoustic guitars.
“When we play those songs, people become wildly enthusiastic now because they sound right,” Stewart says. “I went through a period of not wanting to hear them but it’s all changed now because I can do them properly.”
Al Stewart and the Empty Pockets
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 11.
Where: Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd St., Phoenix.
Admission: $30-$60.
Details: 602-267-1600, celebritytheatre.com.
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Al Stewart on 'Year of the Cat,' 'Time Passages' and the price of fame
